Father: an obituary

1984- My father threatened to leave the family. I was in my room as he stormed about the living room, collecting useless objects, such as the TV remote. He looked at me and told me that he would come back for me. He would not let me go with him, and I went to bed sorry I was ever born. The next morning, a Saturday, father came in as I was eating cereal and watching cartoons. He was tired and unshaven, wearing the same clothes as the night before. Everyone was still asleep from the long night before. Father stood in the door, in the early morning bright sunlight, both of us staring at one another in understanding –his from age and mine from innate feelings. I was to learn at that moment what capitulation looked like. I saw it in his face, a man not destined to have a family, not to be tied down to one woman or one town. I could see in his dark native eyes a man not meant to be a father to a sensitive son. I got up spilling cereal and hugged him, welcoming him back to our home. He smiled, rubbing my thick hair and handed me the remote. I flipped channels as he went to sleep in the bedroom of endless apologies.

1990- You are old father! This breaks my heart to contemplate. I can only conceive you as the fallen Colossus. I consider you crumbled into shards, a bulking leg there, a clenched fist beside, all of you lost beneath the watery memories of both our youths, your body worn slowly away, your mind wrapped in the mushy green haze of your thoughts, thoughts cut from the light of the sun, far and deep beneath.

1998- I go to visit my father in prison. He has been transferred from Pennsylvania to South Carolina and is closer now. It is the summer and humid, and I shiver from sorrow. I arrive in the waiting room of the prison, waiting for my father to appear. Prisoners come in to see their family members. There is no sight of him coming in, so I scan the room, looking at all the people and their hushed conversations; there is an old prisoner with no hair in the far corner by the door. I feel sorry for him, feeling what it feels to be alone, no one for a dejected man. The old prisoner turns and looks in my direction and I at him. It is my father and I wave at him to come over.
“Do I know you?” He asks.
“You are old father. You talk like a child. It’s me, your son.”
Although his mind is old, his physical shape is good. He looks as if he bench-presses an extreme amount of weights. Later, after we eat, my seventy-five year old father tells me he is bench-pressing 300 pounds every morning. I do not recognize the man in front of me, nor does he recognize the man I have become.
I leave him, he waving at me; waving like a father from the front door of his house to a son leaving for college. This old man has bars on the door to protect others.

2002- I see my father when I visit him in a few years after he has gotten out of prison. This is what I witness: he has the essential heart conditions of a seventy-nine year-old. He is an old man of native leathery skin, with brown eyes searching and wondering what God, if any, will greet him: Cherokee or White? There are dark purple veins tracing along his arms, bulking globules under his skin; veins that remind me of a cold river, pooling, forever pooling until they will pool and overflow. Rivers will overflow when the banks have given away . . . overflow from his heart into his lungs, into kidneys, into his brain. He has all of the possibilities of his arteries splitting, snapping, or wearing away at anytime. His body is dried, brittle, lacking luster, almost it seems, hard to my tender touch. He is not the warrior I have always known. He is dying slowly, dying cruelly for the man he is. He and I both wished he could die a warrior’s death. I look at him, a cracked and crumbling colossus, and envision when he dies, people will come to me and say, “Your father is dead.” I will look at them confused and remember my remarkably marked childhood and then thank them.
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I have been to the edge of his world, and he has always taken me to the next ledge of falseness. I was the boy who sat in the imprint of his heart, the insignificant correction of the editorial. The boy who sat under the newspaper, looking to him, and him seeing the paper instead. -I have learned the art of reading social commentaries in reverse. Perhaps I was lost on him as much as the 6th page obituaries. A splendid and colorful son covered arbitrarily by black print. -Under the recliner, at your footstep . . . under the footstep of your recliner. I was the boy who played with match-cars under the insensibly well-informed mind of a distant father.
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December 7, 2004- There is death and there is re-birth. You were a good father. You will be a good son.